Zomato on Wednesday unveiled a crowd-friendly real-time weather monitoring infrastructure. Called Weather Union, the company highlighted that the system is the first of its kind in India and the largest private infrastructure of its kind in the country. Announcing the platform, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal said its API will be free to access for all institutions and businesses for “the good of our economy”. The food delivery giant is also looking for volunteers who can offer space in their facilities to install weather monitoring stations to further expand the project.
Goyal announced Weather Union in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) and said that more than 650 weather stations have already been placed on the ground and are currently operational. These stations provide real-time weather data with various parameters such as temperature, rainfall intensity, total precipitation, humidity, wind speed and direction, and more.
Excited to introduce India's first publicly supported weather infrastructure https://t.co/pUhhX8zKMe. An own network of more than 650 terrestrial weather stations, it is the largest private infrastructure of this type in our country.
These weather stations, developed by Zomato, provide… pic.twitter.com/lc5XQJJtO2
— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) May 8, 2024
The company has also created a website where people can check live weather conditions in 45 cities across the country. Zomato plans to expand its network to more cities soon. The platform updates the live weather status every minute to reflect current conditions. It also claims a signal accuracy of about 96 percent. The platform can display up to 12 different weather parameters.
According to Zomato, the weather infrastructure captures real-time data that is processed by its internal machine learning models. The processed information will then be shared with delivery partners to help them prepare and equip themselves to deal with any unusual weather conditions. Notably, the Zomato app also has a surge pricing feature where users will have to pay an additional amount to order food during rain or any other weather-related disturbance.
Goyal also revealed that the company will provide all institutions and companies with free API access to the infrastructure. Calling it Zomato Giveback, the CEO said the decision was taken for the public good and to increase the productivity of the economy. Interested organizations can go to the Weather Union platform to find the button to access the API or download previous data. However, it should be noted that the company does not provide any weather forecast data, only real-time weather data.
Goyal further highlighted that in order to launch the first phase of the weather monitoring system, the help of many Zomato employees who installed the ground weather stations at their premises had to be enlisted. However, with the intention of expanding the project, the company is looking for more volunteers who can offer the same. Added a volunteer form to the Weather Union website.
